I was having a conversation with some friends today and someone mentioned that Rick Perry might have problems in the election because there were rumors he was gay. So I went to google and typed in “Rick Perry is” and google kindly offered me the following auto-complete options: “gay”, “an idiot”, “a rino“, “evil”, “not a conservative”. This got me thinking how this compared with the other candidates google auto-completes. For instance, if you google “Mitt Romney is” you get suggestions like “a mormon” and ” an idiot” as well as three other suggestions. I did this for all of the major candidates (sorry Thaddeus) and recorded the five google auto-complete suggestions.

Then I created a vector for each candidate based on the google auto-complete words. Each candidate was an observation and each word was a variable. The candidate would get a 5 if the word was first on their list, a 4 if it was second, and so on with a 0 if the word was not mentioned in their auto-complete.

“a douchebag” appears in auto-completes for Santorum, Gingrich, and Pawlenty. I imagine it will be hard to win with this word attached to your name. (John Kerry couldn’t do it.)

The only overwhelmingly positive google auto-complete was for Herman Cain whose fifth auto-complete option was “awesome”

It can’t be good for Perry that he is so close to Pawlenty and Santorum, but he does have a significant amount of support at this point. I’ll be interested to see how these Google auto-completes changes over time and with the polls.